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Opera Free as in Beer
nekura writes "Just last month, Opera was celebrating their 10 year anniversary by giving away free registration codes; now they've trumped that by offering Opera for free. Quoth their site, 'Opera has removed the banners, found within our browser, and the licensing fee. Opera's growth, due to tremendous worldwide customer support, has made todays milestone an achievable goal. Premium support is available.' Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now has virtually no reason not to."
Anyone who was on the verge of switching before now have virtually no reason not to
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I'm glad there's a version without the annoying advertising, but it wasn't that which was keeping me from using Opera.
In my experience, people get fed up with IE and just switch. There's nobody out there who's thinking, "gee, the fact that just about everything out there is better than IE is tempting...but, man I sure do like Microsoft!"
Sorry, but nobody was holding out for free Opera. If you couldn't take IE's shit for another day, you're already using Firefox, not waiting for an also-ran browser to stop charging.
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Its easier to get Opera to make a change to their browser than Firefox. I needed a specific CSS feature that was used by my company on its pages, and neither FF or Opera supported it properly. I submitted the bug to Opera and to FF. I also wrote a patch later that week for FF. The FF developers completely ignored me and my patch and any further requests. Meanwhile, Opera's next beta had the problem fixed with no further interaction from me, except for an email request for a way to reproduce the bug. FF is open-source only in name and the fact that I can see the code. Every part of the development is totally closed.
LL
Great, so all the customers like me who handed over our hard earned money were suckered? No refund, no explanation, nothing. I'm migrating to Mozilla, I'm sick of opera (the company, not the broswer).
I agree that this is a reason not to use it for people who want free (as in freedom) software.
However, I think those people are clearly in the minority.
Finally, I don't like you implying that people who disagree with you on free software don't value freedom, that's just stupid and insulting.
Oh, and site compatability.
Seriously, I love everything about opera except printing. I browse using opera, print using firefox, and access MSIE-only sites (just a few that really don't work; most just say they don't) with konqueror.
patchwork, patchwork, patchwork.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Oh, don't tell me that Mozilla is so pure about it. They even have now document.all['..'] in quirks mode (IIRC).
You wish. Opera bussiness is doing very well. At least 80% of their revenues come from the mobile market. They employed about 150 people last year, in second quarter/2005 they had 44.5% growth in sales. They are profiting.
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I'm using opera mini since a few weeks and it absolutely rocks. It has literally changed my mobile life - any info I might think at is now in the palm of my hands, fast and cheap, and on any regular lightweight mobile phone. Too bad opera didn't make it a free offer, too, I had to let a norwegian friend get a copy for me. But for me, at least, Opera, funded 1994, finally seems to start becoming important. Good move.
Opera, in my experience, has been quite a bit faster than Firefox. I'm going to give it another whirl when I get home today, compare the two, and see if I want to switch or not. But you use whatever works best for you. The only potential issue I may have with Opera is that, last I heard, Presto doesn't render things quite as W3C-properly as Gecko-based browsers do. Still better than Trident, though. Also, I like to support OSS, but hey, if Opera is better, I'll use it.
But both browsers are good, quality browsers. In my opinion, you can't go wrong either way.
"Excuse me, did you say 'Trekker'? The word is 'Trekkie.' I should know; I created them." -- Gene Roddenberry
Definitely.
That's the same reason I actually ordered my copy of Slackware 10.1 from the Slackware Store, even though it was available free for the taking.
The way I see it, I got more than a year's worth of use out of Slackware 9.1, and I didn't pay anything for that (being the first version of Slackware I tried). I figure I got way more than $39.95's worth of use, so I showed my support by actually purchasing the next release I wanted to have.
I don't have an aversion to paying for quality software.
And the circle of life continues to spin, occasionally wobbling on its axis thanks to the weighty presence of dumb.
My impression is that the real money was in licensing it to cell phone makers anyway.
I've not understood how this works - Sony Ericsson "recommend" using Opera on the P900, yet they bundle the crumby Symbian browser instead. Why don't they just bundle the devices with Opera on the ROM since presumably they've paid a licence fee for it (so their customers can install Opera for free).
http://blog.nexusuk.org
By 2000 Opera was old. I was using it in 1998, and then it was the bee's knees. You could (and still can) surf the web normally without ever touching your mouse. Opera taught me how much time is actually wasted by using a mouse, and what a crutch it is.
If thou see a fair woman pay court to her, for thus thou wilt obtain love
The real question is - are they going to bother updating their desktop browser any more if their profits all come from the mobile version?
Pretty handy that he had the knowledge to fix it... myself, I wouldn't have known how to fix it... what about all the other people potentially having the same problem? Is it that much harder for FF to put in a patch that someone else has written to save everyone else the trouble?
Could you please point me to the Mozilla bug in question? Better late than never...
So instead he required every client to pay money for the Opera browser, just to open his webpage? Kind of doubtful...
I have mixed feelings about this. Opera has so many features that (to me) it is worth paying for. I hope that they will be able to maintain it without the income it's sales generated.
On the other hand, hopefully many people will now check it out and see what a great browser it is.
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None are so hopelessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
That's just one possible reason to give something away. There are plenty of others. Loss-leaders, for example. Added value to other products is another example. When Microsoft started giving away Internet Explorer it wasn't because it was obsolete and uncompetitive, was it?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Well, they certainly have no reason not to try Opera. Switch? I do appreciate the open development model of competing browsers like Firefox. As someone who cares about open standards and think the web will get better the more we embrace them, I like the fact that Opera is not Microsoft. Nothing against Redmond, but it matters a lot to me that browser's design is done independently of any server's design.
I'm using the Debian 3.1 version on Ubuntu right now and have to admit it's a pretty snappy browser. It renders Slashdot nicely. I may keep playing with it, but I'm not sure I'll switch from Firefox with Deer Park coming out soon. These browsers are pretty much on par, so I think I'll take the open source one.
I feel kind of bad for Opera. That the browser is now free is an indication that the company realizes it can no longer sell its flagship product. You know, for money. That's got to hurt.
Did you patch and compile your Firefox? Or did you just download binary like 80 millions other users?
But I've always been happy to admit: Opera's the better browser. And now that it's completely gratis, it's going to be hard to justify my Firefox habit.
Well you've only had it open since 10 this morning. I've run firefox on linux for weeks and after a few days it starts bloating especially if you have extensions that try to replicate opera's session support. Here is my current firefox process:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
16563 timmy 15 0 443m 243m 25m S 0.0 19.3 56:13.84 firefox-bin
as you can see, about 443 MB virtual memory (doesn't matter), but 243 MB resident in memory, so that is one big sucker there. it's used 56hours of computing time and been up since Sep12 (8 days ago)
A casual user might not notice that since Opera branding is not visible. Even the user agent is
I spend a lot of time catering my software to its users, and the vast majority of them are nice to me in return. However unfortunately there are plenty of arseholes (like you?) who seem to think my time is solely for their benefit, that they owe me nothing, and that they can expect everything from me.
Yes you can expect quality user-orientated software from projects that advertise these features. But you can't expect this from all software and you can't go round acting like it's somehow owed to you.
Yes its true not all open source developers are reasonable, and they spout bullshit like "fix it yourself. But actually most of the time the people that say this sort of nonsense is zealot-users. Most developers have the sense to know that most users cannot fix it themselves. Hell I wouldn't even attempt to fix a firefox flaw, I have no intention of learning my way into such a huge codebase.
So yes if Opera fix rendering issues more readily than Firefox I agree that Opera are doing a better job! And yes it probably is a systematic problem with Open Source, but that's because nobody ever pays any of us any money for what we do. So we have to do it in our freetime, and we have less incentive to fix bugs. Generally I fix bugs in my projects because I am determined to release a perfect bit of software, but certainly I often don't want to bugfix - it's boring - and I'm far less inclined to fix a bug that is submitted by an arrogant user, usually the quote is "Fix it or I'll use something else!". I'm only human, and this kind of comment will obviously be upsetting!
I admit that I am assuming your opinion from your affirmation of the grandparent, and thus I apologise if actually you have a better understanding of open source development and developers.
What the hell ever happened to putting the user first, to valuing and maximizing the benefit the project provides to non-developers?
That's for that other software building model. Closed source and pay some one else to do it.
If you don't like the way an F/OSS project has neglected your bugs/features, then you fork and fix it yourself. No one else is going to do it for you unless you pay them.
just a few small corrections here.
;)
your first point is right on the money, ~5 MB (opera) to ~15 MB (firefox)
point 2. Does not compute.
Even after 3 days of reading slashdot the most I've ever gotten firefox* up to is about 90MB with 2 windows and 24 tabs open. Also, on a 'fresh' load of the identical 'saved in tabs' bookmarks firefox uses 12MB less RAM than opera. albeit opera is better at prolonged usage in terms of ram, since it rarely if ever goes past 50MB, while firefox can easily go to 60-90 MB
point 3 Dubious claims... considering the entire interface of firefox is rendered by the gecko engine using java etc... perhaps on a slow computer, with low ram you could mamage to get 15x faster perfomance out of opera than out of gecko/firefox... but on the typical PC being sold in stores today the margin is going to be quite slim, between the two engines.
Since opera started getting better about standards compliance, yes they're now about comperable. for a good while firefox was in the lead, but this is the kind of thing that can change as often as someone ratifies a new 'standard' at the w3c
*= i run firefox pretty well from a 'stock' configuration, no plugins, no extentions, just a browser. claiming that firefox 'easily consumes 200MB' is quite misleading, as only a firefox bloated down with dozens of 'feature extending' extenions will consume that much ram. hardly fair to blame the browser for the extentions bloated RAM use.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
Opera does have a spellcheck; just right-click on a word and it's near the bottom of the menu.
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